\(\mathbf {MQ}\)  seeks to discover the automaton's outcome for a particular string. Originally, the purpose of \(\mathbf {MQ}\)  is to know whether a string belongs to the language to be learnt or, equivalently, whether it is accepted by the associated automaton. This name has been kept in later applications to other classes of automata.
In [1]}, [2]}, the framework is used to prove learnability of multiplicity automata which compute functions mapping strings to elements of a field. In this case, the name \(\mathbf {MQ}\)  is retained even when the answer is the value of the computed function, which may not be Boolean. The same approach is followed in [3]} where \(\mathbf {MQ}\)  is used to refer to the function that returns the probability of the last symbol in a string.
